Irish state broadcaster RTE is reporting that the “Strofades IV” - a boat hired by Ken O’Keefe and other sane and rational lovers of the international limelight to bring aid to Gaza - is steaming back to Greece from the Libyan port of Derna with the self-righteous ones as unwilling passengers. Why? Because the ship’s captain got tired of being given the run around instead of his agreed fee. Check this story out too for further amusing background.
The Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) has the reputation of being one of the finest universities in Spain. It is financed by the state and it certainly has an original policy regarding the hiring of teaching staff. From February to June this year it allowed Juan Antonio Aguilar and Jesús Palacios to teach a course in its Faculty of Political Science and Sociology.
Continue reading ‘Neo-Fascists Teaching In Top Spanish University’
The present government of Spain, a socialist government, in name at least, has:
increased by 34% the percentage of their income tax that citizens may give to the Catholic church,
abandoned proposals to reform the religious freedom law and hence leave the Catholic church to enjoy privileges denied to other religions,
There’s a long interview with Felipe González, the former socialist prime minister of Spain, in El País today. In it he speaks of an opportunity he spurned to carry out a targeted assassination of the leadership of the Basque terrorist group ETA.
Continue reading ‘Felipe González And Targeted Assassinations’
About 20% of Israel’s population is Arab and Israel comes in 15th in the UN’s (yes, the UN) latest Human Development Index rankings. The closest ranking Arab country, the UAE, comes in at number 32 on the list.
via Yaacov
The Casa Sefarad-Israel is a state-sponsored body in Spain which aims to increase awareness in that country of its Sephardic heritage and Jewish culture in general and to improve ties between Spain and Israel. It has just released the results of a survey it commissioned on attitudes towards Jews in Spain.
Continue reading ‘New Research on Attitudes To Jews in Spain’
“World By Storm” is the pseudonym of one of the principal writers at The Cedar Lounge Revolution, an excellent Irish politics blog. In this entry he distracts himself from Ireland’s catastrophic economic situation by considering the Northern Ireland analogy. Unlike most people so tempted, he can’t be accused of ignorance of Irish politics and history.
A brief coda to this post. If the opinion polls are anything to go by then Dilma Rousseff will today be elected President of Brazil. Her father was born in the Bulgarian city of Gabrovo. Gabi Ashkenazi is the 19th Chief of Staff of the IDF. His father was also born in Bulgaria, just 90 kilometers south of Gabrovo in the city of Plovdiv.
When waged with appropriate means to achieve realistic ends, the answer is, “It’s a really effective means of imposing your will on the enemy”. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar. He classifies those who continue to fire rockets at Israel as rebels and continues:
Over at The Tablet and in the context of the attempt to bomb synagogues in Chicago Lee Smith writes:
Terror, violence, and bloodshed against Jews now come pre-packaged with a sanctimonious justification. It’s not seen as crazy, sick, irrational violence. It’s political violence. Terrorist violence is irrational and incomprehensible-unless the victims are Jewish. Why do terrorists bomb America, bomb London, bomb Madrid, bomb Casablanca, burn Mumbai? Because they’re crazy, that’s why. With the Jews, well, there’s the occupation. There’s Israel. There’s America’s support for Israel. Terrorism may be abhorrent, but when it comes to the Jews the terrorists themselves have a lot to be angry about. Accordingly, we’re supposed to regard these acts with both horror and reason at the same time-”sure, it’s not pretty, but we get it.” In other words, terror against Jews may produce violence and bloodshed, but not moral revulsion.
1. In response to my post about Ireland’s law of return, a reader who signs himself “lapsedmethodist” asks,
Who would the potential Irish citizen be displacing upon his/her return to Ireland should he/she avail of that option?
I think that this question reflects a view of history that plagues much commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Those who hold it see the Zionist enterprise as unjust from the outset because it sought and seeks to persuade a great number of people to move somewhere else, to a place where people who are not part of that enterprise already live.
Continue reading ‘The Philosophy Of History Of Anti-Zionism’
1. In a discussion over at Engage in which he offers arguments in support of a boycott of Israel and only Israel, Ran Greenstein says,
Third, any diminishing of the capacity of the Israeli state to continue with its exclusionary and abusive practices is a blow against anti-semitism, because it relieves Jews of the burden of having to pay a price for Israeli policies they do not support and have nothing to do with them.
Continue reading ‘Gurvitz-Goldman, Greenstein And Good Jews’
Israel’s Law of Return is sometimes held to be racist because it confers the right to citizenship on Jews born outside Israel who may have had no previous connection with it. In posts on this blog I’ve often made the counterargument that many countries offer privileges to members of their diaspora when it comes to obtaining citizenship and in this regard I’ve pointed to the example of Ireland, of which I myself am a citizen, and stated that having just one Irish grandparent entitles any good-for-nothing from Buenos Aires or Brooklyn to an Irish passport.
The Basque terrorist group ETA announced a ceasefire at the beginning of September and, as I described here, the response from the Spanish government was to tell the nationalist gunslingers where they could shove it.
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